Digital Home Thoughts: Forrester Survey: iTunes, Others to Pick Up Slack in Music Sales

"Online music sales will grow rapidly over the next five years, though traditional music sales will still make up almost two thirds of revenues in 2011, according to a survey released Monday by market researcher Forrester. The study forecast a 30 percent decline in European sales of traditional music formats like CDs and DVDs, but music downloads on the Web from shops like iTunes Music Store from Apple Computer will fill the gap. Online sales are seen growing more than tenfold to 3.9 billion euros ($4.70 billion) in 2011 from 279 million euros ($335.17 million) in 2006. The total music sales market will grow to nearly 11 billion euros ($13.21 billion) by 2011, up from less than 9.5 billion euros ($11.41 billion) now, as the new sales channels will boost demand."

While unsurpising that this is the trend, I didn't think that we were headed to this much of a growth in online music sales. I still figured most people preferred to buy CDs. I guess it is the additional hassle of ripping the CDs and then encoding them into the format (aac, mp3, ogg, etc.) that makes online shopping more tractable. Perhaps CD makers should think about how they can include ripped version or some such in their CDs. :)